Antennas for use in the high frequency (HF) and ultra high frequency (UHF) bands have traditionally utilized “whip” designs. These whip antennas may be cheap, durable, and easy to repair, but may be relatively large and include a substantial projection from the surface to which the antenna is mounted.
Recently developed antennas include compact and directional antennas from microwave to millimeter frequency bands utilizing a variety of architectures, such as fractal, smart, chip, and dipole antennas. Although some of the compact antenna designs provide improvements including smaller size and weight, the compact antenna designs fail to provide conformability, or low profile, to the application surface and/or bandwidths which may be reasonably utilized. Additionally, these compact antennas may have limited radiative efficiency when in proximity to metallic surfaces.